PhD student Pradeep Kumar Sacitharan, of the Kennedy Institute has won the Medical Sciences Division heat of the Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition.
Developed by The University of Queensland in 2008, the 3MT is a research communication competition, which challenges PhD students to present their thesis topic and its significance in a compelling way to a non-scientific audience, in just three minutes. The competition proved incredibly successful, has been adopted by a number of universities worldwide and is now run nationally in a few countries, such as the UK.
Pradeep is supervised by Professor Tonia Vincent and Dr James Edwards at NDORMS and is working on the relationship between ageing and osteoarthritis.
“The 3MT was a great chance to convey my research in a simple, fun and engaging manner to grab the public’s imagination and to inspire them through science”, says Pradeep.
Preparing his presentation, the 3rd year student thought about his mother and grandmother and how he would make his research work both accessible and interesting to them. He added: “This presentation wasn’t about me, nor for myself; it’s about them, your audience, what can they relate to? What matters to them? Why they should care about the research?”
The University heat of the competition is on 23 June, followed by an online semi-final and the national grand final in September. We wish Pradeep the best of luck in getting his research to the public; he’s already doing a fantastic job.